Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway arrived in Paris in December 1921, and stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre (Hotel Jacob) at 44 Rue Jacob (6th). Washington Irving stayed here in 1805. Sherwood Anderson stayed here in 1921 when he arrived in France, and recommended the place to Hemingway.

His regular eating place at the beginning was the Restaurant of the Pré aux Clercs, at the corner of Rue Jacob and Rue Bonaparte , one block east.

On Christmas Day, 1921, Hemingway and Hadley walked down Rue Bonaparte and crossed the Seine to the Café de la Paix on Ave de l'Opéra for lunch.

The first apartment Hadley found for Ernest and herself, in January 1922, was at 74 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine (5th), between the Sorbonne and the Faculté des Sciences. One of the cafés Hemingway frequented was the Café des Amateurs, around the corner on Rue Mouffetard.

During his early times in Paris, Ernest Hemingway frequented the Jardins du Luxembourg (6th arr). He hung out around the Medici Fountain and around closing time when the gardiens were occupied, Ernest would grab and strangle a pigeon, and smuggle it out of the gardens hiden in the baby carriage with his son.

Another very early hangout was the Dôme Café at 108 Bvd Montparnasse, where he drank hot rum punches. The Rotonde , opposite, was being redecorated when Hemingway first arrived.

In 1922 Hemingway, still living at Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, rented a room on the top floor at 39 Rue Descartes (the street continues south as Rue Mouffetard). He paid 60 francs a month, for a place to write, with a fireplace where he roasted chestnuts, and described the room in A Moveable Feast.

A popular hangout of Hemingway and many others, and where Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, was the Café Falstaff at 14 Rue Delambre (14th). The original bar was the Dingo Bar (later the Auberge du Centre), at number 10 Rue Delambre, before Jimmy the barman moved to the Falstaff next door, taking his clients with him.

During the 1920s, Hemingway was an avid spectator of the six-day bicycle races at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, at 8 Bvd de Grelelle by the Pont de Bir Hakeim and the metro Bir HIkeim. Hemingway dragged many friends along (some less than willingly), including John Dos Passos. The Vélodrome d'Hiver, opened in 1910, was torn down in 1959.

La Closerie des Lilas, at 171 Bvd du Montparnasse (6th & 14th) was Hemingway's favorite café-restaurant. The terrace here is lovely, set beneath trees away from the road, on the corner at Port Royal. Much of the story of The Sun Also Rises is set here, and much of it was written on this terrace. Here also Hemingway was requested by F.Scott Fitzgerald to read the manuscript of The Great Gatsby.

The Café Flore and Café des Deux Magots, at 170 Bvd Saint Germain (6th) , were real hangouts for Hemingway.
According to Sarah Mayfield, in Exiles from Paradise:

"Usually he was alone, bent over his notebook, writing slowly as if he weighed every word, cutting his sentences sharply, ashe chiseled his gem-hard prose" [a]

At the end of 1921, Ezra Pound rented a ground-floor apartment at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs

August 1926, Hemingway isolated himself in Gerald Murphy's apartment on the fifth floor of 69 Rue Froidevaux, at the southern edge of the Montparnasse cemetery (14th) . He corrected the proofs of The Sun Also Rises, here, not answering the door for anybody.
NB: Some documents have identified this as number 60, Rue Froidevaux.

In the summer of 1926, Hemingway left Hadley and his son and moved in with Pauline Pfeiffer at 6 Rue Férou, at the northwest edge of the Luxembourg Gardens (6th) . He worked on A Farewell to Arms here.

In May of 1927 Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer were married. The honeymooned in the Mediterranean seaside town of Le Grau-du-Roi, at the edge of the Camargue.

Winter 1929, Sylvia Beach introduced Hemingway to the writer and poet Allan Tate, when Tate was staying at the Hotel Michelet-Odéon, at 6 Place de l'OdéonErnest and Allan walked from Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company at number 12 Rue de l'Odéon to the Café Voltaire at the Place de l'Odéon.

Hemingway was a frequent visitor to Shakespeare and Company, sometimes to borrow books or borrow money, and gave joint readings with Stephen Spender.

On 26 August 1944, Ernest Hemingway had an exciting reunion with Sylvia and Shakespeare and Company:

There was still a lot of shooting going on in the rue de l'Odéon, and we were getting tired of it, when one day a string of jeeps came up the street and stopped in front of my house. I heard a deep voice calling: "Sylvia!: And everybody in the street took up the cry of "Sylvia!" "It's Hemingway! It's Hemingway!" cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered. We went up to Adrienne's apartment and sat Hemingway down. He was in battle dress, grimy and bloody. A machine gun clanked on the floor. He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do for us. We asked him if he could do something about the Nazi snipers on the roof tops in our street, particularly on Adrienne's roof top. He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up to the roof. We heard firing for the last time in the rue de l'Odéon. Hemingway and his men came down again and rode off in their jeeps - "to liberate," according to Hemingway, "the cellar at the Ritz." [b]

Winter 1956, Hotel Ritz at 15, Place Vendôme. Hemingway stopped by the Ritz for a drink one day, and the baggage man asked him to remove his trunks, which had been in the storage room since 1927. Ernest found in the trunks the notes he later used to write A Moveable Feast